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The feds have their uderwear in a knot over some Somali Islamo-threat against shopping malls in Minnesota and Canada. Perhaps the feds need to take a look at our history of messing around in Middle Eastern countries’ affairs and try to come up with the conclusion that Islamic terrorism exits because we keep trying to run those countries’ affairs to our benefit. Maybe withdrawing from the area and stopping our meddling is the way to end Islamic terrorism?

Aaron Altman: I know you care about him. I’ve never seen you like this about anyone, so please don’t get me wrong when I tell you that Tom, while being a very nice guy, is the Devil. Jane Craig: This isn’t friendship. You’re crazy, you know that? Aaron Altman: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Jane Craig: God! Aaron Altman: Come on! Nobody is going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red, pointy tail! What’s he gonna sound like? [hisses] Aaron Altman: No. I’m semi-serious here. Jane Craig: You’re seriously… Aaron Altman: He will be attractive! He’ll be nice and helpful. He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He’ll never do an evil thing! He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing… he will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit. And he’ll talk about all of us really being salesmen. And he’ll get all the great women.

I don’t know why anyone thinks working hard gets you ahead in a society where wealth is entirely based on what you own, not on how hard you work or what you produce. All the wealth in our economy — every bit of it — is produced by workers; but their hard work only makes their bosses rich. Even though our economy has become richer, more productive, and more efficient, even cent of its productivity gains of the last 45 years have gone to wealthy capitalists, while workers are worse off. Which may help explain why people in their prime working years — especially males — are dropping out of the labor force in droves. Why work when you can enjoy the good life by flipping stocks, real estate, bitcoins, or derivatives?

Which may help explain why people in their prime working years — especially males — are dropping out of the labor force in droves.

Actually, the prime working years – those in which people are socking away from retirement – are those in which the labor participation rate is greater. Maybe it’s because of aging in the baby boomer wave but it’s not falling.

The decline in male participation has been going on since the 1940s.

Women are participating less, since the Clinton years.

The BLS lists the following factors as primary drivers of the decline in the LFP rate since 2000: (1) the aging of the baby boomer cohort; (2) the decline in the participation rate of those 16-24 years old; (3) the declining LFP rate of women (since its peak in 1999), and (4) the continuous decline of the LFP rate of men (since the 1940s).

The main factors that keep the aggregate LFP rate from falling further are the increase of the LFP rate of those 55 and older and the strong attachment to the labor force of Hispanic and Asian people, who constitute the main share of the immigrant population.

It’s one reason we may find that there is less Hispanic support at the ballot box for immigration reform that permits more foreign labor to enter the country than some Dems seem to think. The Hispanic population is productive, and has something to protect.

I’m happy to see Elizabeth Warren joining the president in putting an end to the pillaging of 401Ks by Wall Street’s congenital crooks. And have you ever noticed that Republikkkans always resort to slander when their incompetency is compared to Democratic successes? If they are hoping to somehow damage Obama so Clinton is forced to run against him, they are dead wrong.

“American Sniper” joins a long list of very profitable movies that didn’t win Best Picture.

I saw it, liked it but it was an Eastwood movie. Point A to Point C via Point B, no surprises. And Clint has never broken any new ground cinematically. Was Sniper the best War Movie of 2015, yep. Did it steal shots and framing and even dialog from previous war movies, yep. (Have you seen Three Kings? Did you catch the theft, er…homage Clint Pulled off?) “Sniper” had the added pressure of being a recent known story so I went in knowing the ending. In the hands of a more skilled director one can get away with that, (Wofgang Peterson, “Perfect Storm” Ron Howard, yeah I give him shit but when he’s on…., Apollo 13, for example) “Hey, Bradley Cooper is going to kill a lot of people on the battlefield and be a bad-ass and then he’ll get shot, spoiler alert, and Clint never once had me forgetting that. I liked the movie fine but Best Picture, not a chance. Note that the Critics choice awards, people who watch movies on a professional level, “American Sniper” wasn’t even nominated. The critics didn’t just find a film they liked better than “Sniper” like the Academy did, they found ten movies they liked better. And these are people who write for print, do local TV and come from all over the country not just Hollywood. Now I’m sure a lot of these critics had “sniper” on their nominees ballot but not enough of them to get it inot the Top Ten. (They had “Nightcrawler” in there which was my second favorite movie this year after Birdman, rent it, it’s really good.)

Birdman had me the way my first viewing Momento had me. Holy crap, what did I just see, let’s watch it again. (DVD) The three non-kid movies I saw in the theater this year were Hobbit (I’m going to kick Peter Jackson’s ass if we ever meet) Mockingjay (liked it but it’s mindless sci-fi action) and “Sniper,”

And to make claims on the quality of a movie based on Box Office numbers is stupid.

Here’s a few box office yearly winners that didn’t win:

Back to the Future – Best Picture, Best Director Robert Zemeckis Three Men and a Baby – Best Picture, Best Director Leonard Nimoy (That will win you bar trivia some day.) Jurassic Park – Best Picture, Best Director Steven Spielberg How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Best Picture Ron (Why Ron, Why?) Howard SpiderMan 3 – Best Picture, Best Director Sam Raimi

See Birdman though. It really is good. In a “Million Dollar Baby” year where the other films just weren’t that strong “Sniper” would have won. “The Aviator” meh, Ray, good but a biopic and nothing new there, Finding Neverland? And the further away from the first time I saw “Sideways” I get the less I like it.

This wasn’t that year.

As an aside, a former boss of mine is an Academy member. Won best documentary short in the early 80s so she’s a member for life. She’s on the Documentary and Foriegn films comittee or at least still was at my last contact with her 3-4 years ago. To get nominated 30 people have to screen 30-50 films, sign in at the screenings so you can’t skip any and then rank their top five. Higest five overall move on like the AP Football poll scoring. After that 1000+ people get to vote (except on technical awards, sound editing, editing only people who actually work in those fields vote on those.) Getting nominated has always been more imressive to me than winning. Every year that I worked for her company there was at least one Best Picture nominee that she didn’t get around to watching and they send voters free DVDs (VHS back then) of all the films. I kind of liked that job because not only did I get to borrow those free DVDs and say I’ve seen all the movies but we got Oscar Monday off. Yeah, on the fringiest fringe of Hollywood we all wept when they moved the Oscars to a Sunday because we lost a paid holiday.

@7 “Actually, the prime working years – those in which people are socking away from retirement – are those in which the labor participation rate is greater. Maybe it’s because of aging in the baby boomer wave but it’s not falling.”

The prime working years are defined as ages 25 to 54, which is the demographic group where labor participation is falling the fastest and most. Labor participation of seniors (65+) is actually rising.

@7 “It’s one reason we may find that there is less Hispanic support at the ballot box for immigration reform that permits more foreign labor to enter the country than some Dems seem to think. The Hispanic population is productive, and has something to protect.”

Hispanics are going to vote Republican because they don’t want their fathers, brothers, husbands, wives, uncles, aunts, and children to come to this country for jobs?

@12 I haven’t heard that Elizabeth Warren is planning to take over 401(k) retirement plans. Last I heard, she was proposing stiffer regulation of banks to keep the vulture bankers from stealing citizens’ retirement funds, which sounds like a good idea to me. I’d vote for her before I’d vote for any laissez-faire libertarian anarchist who wants to let thieving bankers run roughshod over the little people, which describes most Republican politicians these days.

Hispanics are going to vote Republican because they don’t want their fathers, brothers, husbands, wives, uncles, aunts, and children to come to this country for jobs?

No, but those who are here, whose children are here, and whose parents , uncles, and aunts are dead, worked hard to get what they have and aren’t necessarily just going to let the immigration dam gates open without some pushback. Hispanics making less than $50,000 split their vote evenly

Roger Rabbit Commentary: Don’t expect Congress to be responsive to public opinion on this. Republicans don’t believe in democracy. The GOP exists to preserve and protect the special privileges of the wealthy.

We need government regulation of “business” because unregulated “free enterprise” is dishonest as hell.

“‘This is really abuse in the marketplace,’ said Dr. Steve Miller. Dr. Miller is the chief medical officer at Express Scripts, the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit manager. They paid for John Picard’s creams, but recently stopped covering many of them because, Dr. Miller said, there’s no research proving they work.”

Roger Rabbit Commentary: So a telemarketer cold-calls this guy, finds out who his doctor is, promises him “free” pain treatment, then bills his insurance company $18,000 a month for “medicines” that don’t work. That’s modern American capitalism for you. It’s also why America is going broke. Meanwhile, wingnuts claim government is the “problem” and government spending (on things like the FDA and Consumer Protection Bureau) is “out of control.” Go figure …

Awww… Reading this article really revealed how all these public employee unions survived by trapping unknowing union employees through compulsory dues. Those poor saps had no real opportunity to escape until Walker came along. Very telling. Many then chose to escape and use those dues for family food purchases, etc. and not union thug activities!!!!! http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....ml?hpid=z4

The decline is politically significant in Wisconsin, a presidential battleground where the unions have played a central role in Democrats’ get-out-the-vote drives.

This is the real issue. This is why HA DUMMOCRETINS went nutzo.

Scott Walker also eliminated the kickback scheme of public employee unions saving BIG TIME cash school districts were paying for vastly overpriced health insurance

Which party lost 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, and 11 governorships since the Obummer took office in 2009? So how do you define loonacy? Be a DUMMOCRETIN guvnur… It’s Obummer’s fault… His policies were on the ballot. Obummer said so. http://www.politico.com/story/.....z3Sb4F2X3i

Isn’t that called defenestration? For worf, the stoooopid one

defenestration – the action of dismissing someone from a position of power or authority. BIG TIME!

In an interview with NBC News, Carl, Marsha and Eric Mueller told Today Show anchor Savannah Guthrie that President Obama’s decision to swap alleged deserter and Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five top Taliban commanders had an extremely negative impact on the chances of getting Kayla released. They explained that until Bergdahl was exchanged, they were in regular communication with their daughter. Things went south after Bergdahl’s release.

“That’s when the demands got greater. They got larger. They realized that they had something. They realized that, ‘Well, if they’re gonna let five people go for one person, why won’t they do this? Or why won’t they do that?’” Kayla’s brother Eric said.

Thanks Obummer for bungling the Bergdahl exchange! Of course this information is lost on the teabugging buttbusting buttbigot and the senile schismatic IDIOT Wabbit!

Roger Rabbit Commentary: There’s no impasse or funding crisis here, except for the ones Republicans created out of thin air. Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential election; their candidate didn’t. He has authority to issue Executive Orders, and he’s exercising it; if they disagree, their recourse is to contest the validity of his orders in court.

We constantly listen to barrages of whining from Republicans about “porous borders” and America being overrun by “illegals.” Let’s overlook, for now, the facts — that a Republican administration let those people in because profit-hungry businesses wanted to replace their American workers with cheap Mexican labor; that Obama’s administration is deporting illegals at record rates — and focus on the fact that the Border Patrol, ICE, and entire Homeland Security apparatus are going to run out of money and shut down on Friday.

Democrats aren’t doing that. Republicans are. They’re trying to coerce the president into implementing their policies. But the American people didn’t vote for Republican policies. They elected a Democratic administration.

I don’t know if the Department of Homeland Security will shut down on Friday; but if it does, I’ll know who shut it down: The Republican-controlled Congress that didn’t fund for DHS. Congress, not the president, has power to appropriate funds and enact budgets. This ball is in their court, and theirs alone.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: I’m pretty busy tonight, so I don’t have time to discuss here the precedents established for President Obama’s executive orders on immigration by President Reagan’s and President Bush’s executive orders on immigration. I’ll just say that HA’s resident idiot troll has done a fine job of combining ignorance of these precedents and his customary partisan hypocrisy in his posts criticizing Obama’s executive orders on immigration, and let it go at that for now.

@39 Unions made America’s working class prosperous. No longer sweatshop slaves or tenant farmers, they soon began buying bigger houses and bigger pickup trucks. And voting Republicans. They voted against the unions that made them prosperous. And guess what? They’re not so prosperous anymore. They probably don’t understand why, either. The Republicans are telling them to blame the immigrants, blame taxe, blame “socialism.” So they don’t really understand that they should blame themselves.

This is why no one can trust the absolutely neurotic low IQ monomaniacal moronic moonbattic crazed cretin yellowishleakingbuttspigot…

Walker’s administration has said forcing public employees to contribute more to retirement plans and health insurance helped local governments save $3 billion. The governor also has credited the 2011 law with saving homeowners money on property taxes while giving school districts the ability to make reforms that increased third-grade reading levels and high school graduation rates. And the law has emboldened Republican state lawmakers to further challenge Wisconsin’s labor movement this year by pushing right-to-work legislation that would allow private-sector workers to opt out of paying union dues — a measure Walker has said he would sign.

Two senior US Senate Democrats invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday to a closed-door meeting with Democratic senators during his upcoming visit to Washington, warning that making US-Israeli relations a partisan political issue could have “lasting repercussions.”

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